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Why the Novell / MS Deal Is Very Bad
jamienk writes "PJ from Groklaw has taken the time to really explain the big picture of the Novell/MS deal and how it all fits into the SCO case and the strategy some have employed to attack Free Software. If you thought PJ was becoming too shrill before, or if you haven't understood what the big deal is with Novell's agreement, it's really worth a read." From the article: "This is Groklaw's 2,838th article. We now have 10,545 members, who have worked very hard to disprove SCO's scurrilous claims, and we did. We succeeded, beyond my hopes when we started. But here's the sad part. As victory is in sight, Novell signs a patent agreement with Microsoft..."
Could someone explain to me, in simple terms, how this effects anything I have anything to do with?
I use Ubuntu, why should this matter to me? If the Ubuntu folks don't like what Novell is doing can't they just ignore whatever Novell is doing?
Everyone is acting like this is the end of Linux as we know it. Honestly could someone explain why this is?
Better explanation here: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2068769,00.as p
Novell also retained the unusual right to require SCO to follow its directions to amend, supplement, modify or waive these licenses and, if SCO does not comply, Novell can do so on SCO's behalf.
I don't know about anybody else but this hasn't induced any fear, uncertainty or doubt in me about Linux.
However, it has induced REAL fear, REAL uncertainty and REAL doubt in Novell SUSE. Up until this incident started, I had pretty much decided that SUSE would be the distribution we would base all our new web/db/mail servers on owing to its combination of corporate support and ease of use.
Now I'm back on the fence considering Red Hat or another distro.
Unfortunately, I think SUSE inadvertently screwed themselves. In this regard, I have to say that Red Hat is doing an awesome job. They have deliberately tried to meet the Linux "community standards" while still being commercial. If only they were more open with their non-Fedora distributions, we would have probably standardized on Red Hat from the start.
Sunny
Be my Friend
The short answer, no.
The SCO Group has dug themselves into a rather large litigation hole that surpasses what it would cost to purchase the entire company. They owe something like $20 million to Novell in royalties, Red Hat has a lawsuit which TSCOG will likely lose now that its become obvious to the court that they had been lying all along, and there is the potential of investor lawsuits due to the run up in the stock price to over $20 dollars a share and the eventual collapse as everyone realized they were lying about their evidence.
So you see it would be foolish for IBM to purchase TSCOG at this point because of the huge financial risk now hanging over them.
... why bother... their stock is toast, so couldn't IBM just buy a controlling interest for $11.2M and wind it down?
Doing so would invite thousands of nuisance suits from people who want to be bought off by being bought out. Suing IBM would become both a neat way to make a few million bucks and an exit strategy for every failing company that could make a vuagely-plausible argument that IBM had something to do with their fall.
So instead IBM has chosen to counter-attack, sucking all the blood out of SCO and leaving a dessicated corpse hanging on a spike for all to see.
It's an object lesson on the pitfalls of trying extortion on Big Blue.
They have had this policy for a while. SCO is just the biggest band of fools-or-crooks to come along in a long time, trying something new with ramifications in one of the biggest-bucks fights in a long time: the war between Microsoft and Open Source. So SCO gets the biggest spotlight.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
My inclination has always been to think of the freedom guys as a little strident, and a little too extreme. The things Linus says about licensing have always made the most sense to me intuitively, and the other guys have always come across as a little controlling, and a little crusading.
The one thing I've taken away from the Novell/MS deal, though, is that this stuff is really complicated, and it's really dangerous. I'll be honest -- I don't understand all of the implications of the deal, or why each of the two parties decided to do it. But I feel like something's going on -- like I'm playing 3 card monte on the street or something.
I don't think that non-specialists (ie., geeks who don't think much about law) are in a good position to know what's best.
Novell, and the guys that came to Novell when they bought Ximian and SUSE, have done an incredible amount of good for our community. We are, to a certain extent, depending on Novell's patents to protect us in this coming fight. I think they're good guys, doing what they feel they have to do in order to survive.
But even if this isn't nefarious, it's made us realize that we'd be open to something similar that was nefarious. Those crazy freedom guys weren't so crazy after all.
So I think we have to trust the people who understand these treacherous waters the best -- I think that's Eban Moglen. He says that GPL3 is necessary to counter this threat, and he says it will be effective, even if the kernel remains under GPL2. The toolchain will be enough to do what we need.
I don't want to demonize Novell, because they've given me a lot of great code, and because there are people there who are real heroes to our community. I think they're mistaken, and I think Linus is mistaken to stick with GPL2. It just ain't viral enough to keep us safe.
But instead of attacking people, or getting hysterical, I think the thing to do is to listen to our best legal minds, and back GPL3. So my feeling is that Linus's honor is beyond question, he's obviously a lot smarter than I am, and he might even be smarter than Eban Moglen. But when it comes to law, I'm going to listen to Moglen.
And I would say that the Ximian guys' honor is beyond question, and that they're a lot smarter than I am as well. But I'm still going to listen to Moglen about the law.
Again, my feeling is that we shouldn't let this break down cooperation, we shouldn't let it affect the civility of our community, and we shouldn't attribute bad motives to anyone. But we should play it safe, and innoculate with GPL3.
But I can't read the terms, because it's a secret. And they don't agree in public on what, exactly, the deal was.
Boy, am I relieved!
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Linux can't easily go to GPL3... it is expressly GPL2 without the upgrade clause. Some key developers are DEAD.. you'd have to track down an heir and get them to legally sign over the work to GPL3. Not that parts won't be rewritten, but even then somebody could always claim you "stole" their work by rewriting it under the new license... you'd have the same problems as abandonware apps do now. That's why the FSF sponsored projects require the source be signed over to them and placed on their servers... then they can relicense at will. You of course are free to maintain your own version of your work if you wish, but not the official version.
Geez, I don't have the hardware drivers NOW.
:wq
So basically anyone who purchases Novell's Open Platform Solutions is also paying a Microsoft tax, as Novell's new partner Steve Balmer noted, "because open-source Linux does not come from a company -- Linux comes from the community -- the fact that that product uses our patented intellectual property is a problem for our shareholders" and Steve expects to be paid.
No mitigation of infringement, no proof of infringement, no analysis of the patents to even verify if Microsoft actual has valid IP. Nope, but Novell does us all a favor and bypasses all that boring routine. Thanks but no thanks.
That is easy to imagine, linux would be where OS/2 is. That's how Microsoft cooperates.
I look at where linux is today and I don't think it needs anything from Microsoft.
Interesting you say that. Most people, this is how they see business. To get more market share you've gotta crush the other guy right? There's a fixed number of customers out there and they are only going to buy one company's product, so it better be ours! Thing is, not everyone thinks like that. Our friends over at Sun ("the biggest contributor to Free Software" - RMS) hold the opinion that the way to increase your market share is to grow the market. i.e., get more customers into that market by offering products and services that previously were not available in that market. I think it's an enlightened philosophy. When your competitors don't have to lose so that you may win, then the customer is the ultimate winner. Take notes Microsoft.
How we know is more important than what we know.
They don't sue Ubuntu because those guys are clearly NOT trying to circumvent the spirit of the license. It's Nvidia and their ilk that are doing that. And as long as they aren't actually distributing code, they can get away with it. Suing Ubuntu wouldn't hurt them directly, and would hurt some good people that are trying to do the right thing, so don't expect to see that happen.
What I do expect will happen, at some point, is someone with standing to sue will initiate a dialogue with them, and they'll remove the drivers. I don't think anyone is in a huge hurry about that, however, for the reasons outlined above.
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The kernel coders already replace a large portion of the kernel every year. If Linus wanted to go to GPLv3, he could relicense his own code (a quite small amount, at this point in time, as he's been more of a manager for years) and more importantly encourage everyone else to do the same, and announce that new contributions must be under a compatible license as well of course. After, say, 6 months, he could then identify the code that remains under GPL v2 only (likely a small amount, by this time - remember that much of the code is GPL v2 or later already, and much of what is not is from authors still working and very likely to go along with Linus' wishes) and schedule those parts to be rewritten. At the outside, it might take 2 years to complete the transition.
It would be somewhat of a pain to change, but if he wanted to do it he could definitely do it.
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Linux supports more devices "out of the box" than any other operating system ever has. Yes, even FreeBSD.
r face.c
The other key highlight of this talk was:
Closed source Linux kernel modules are illegal.
Closed source Linux kernel modules are unworkable.
Closed source Linux kernel modules are unethical.
So who the hell is this guy? He's Greg Kroah-Hartman. Who the hell is that? He's a kernel developer. His name appears 149 times in my kernel sources (Ubuntu patched, 2.6.15). And, perhaps more tellingly it appears at the top of the files:
drivers/pci/pci-sysfs.c and
drivers/pci/search.c
both of which contain many functions which are called from functions in this file:
NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-8776-pkg1/usr/src/nv/os-inte
What's that? It's wrapper for the closed source NVIDIA kernel module. What license is that under? The NVIDIA Software License. It's basically a proprietary EULA with a redistribution (without modification) exception for distros. It sure aint the GPL, or "as free" as the GPL (which is techically what the GPL requires for derived works).
So Greg.. why don't you sue them? You've made your position clear, fight them. If you havn't got the money, contact the FSF, assign your copyright to them, get them to fight. Given the choice between opening their source code or not being able to distribute their software at all, NVIDIA will choose to open their source code. How can I be so sure? Cause people buy their chipsets to integrate into things like set top boxes and other devices that run Linux. They need that embedded market, that's why they released the drivers in the first place. The problem is that no-one is making them choose.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Novell didn't really sell Unix to SCO. SCO became a Unix licensing agent for Novell, but technically SCO does own the title to the Unix contracts. SCO collects money on these contracts, remits 100% to Novell, and then Novell pays SCO a pittance for its duties (5%). In order to protect its interests, Novell retained the right, "at its sole discretion and direction, to require SCO to amend, supplement, modify or waive any rights under, or assign any rights to, any SVRX licensee". If SCO failed to abide by this direction, Novell retained the right "to take any such action on behalf of SCO". Novell exercized this right in June 2003, August 2003 and Feb 2004, and is now asking the court for Summary Judgment to force SCO to recognize these 2+ year old waivers. Read the motion, it goes into great detail. Hope that helps enough that you don't have to though, that's the general gist of it.
Unfortunately, it wouldn't be a simple case to prosecute.
You see, Nvidia distributes two works they present as separate. A binary blob, and a 'shim' under the GPL, whose only purpose is to load their blob and link it into the kernel.
Also, Nvidia doesn't distribute the kernel.
So, while it's clearly illegal to distribute a working system using this two-part driver as part of the linux kernel, it's not quite clearly illegal to distribute just those two parts without the kernel, which is what Nvidia does.
They're exploiting a loophole in the GPL, and unfortunately, while I believe a court would probably rule against them in the end, once the entire situation was clearly explained, this would be an incredibly expensive proposition.
Suing distro makers that bundle the kernel, shim, and blob together in a usable form would be much easier, but you know what? No one really wants to sue a distro maker for trying to make their customers lives easier. That's a last resort, only if and when it becomes clear that simply talking to them won't do the trick. And that's how it should be. We're a community, and we don't and shouldn't jump to sue each other unless and until everything else has been tried and failed.
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SCO are trying to assert legal ownership of key IP in the Linux system, and in Linux as a whole. They're sued IBM as a way of establishing this right, and for their pains they are currently being slowly flayed by IBM in the courts.
Novell bought SUSE, one of the big commercial distros. If SCO succeed in their suit, Novell has to buy a licence from SCO or stop distributing Linux. Additionally, Novell reckon that if there is any proprietary IP in Linux, they've got a better claim to it than SCO, and they can prove it. So in the case of SCO, Novell are on our side.
At the same time, Novell have entered into a deal with Microsoft. Most of it seems to be smoke and mirrors, but what it appears to boil down to is that in return for Novell paying a royalty to MS, MS will help their competitive position with respect to the other distros by threatening to sue rival distributors, developers... almost anybody really. Even SUSE users aren't safe, since MS can cancel the agreement with anyone, any time and for any reason. So it's pretty much a promise not to sue unless they really feel like it. Reassuring, huh? Novell also agreed not to use their patent arsenal to defend Linux against MS, and in return, they get a big pot of cash.
In this case, it's rather harder to approve of Novell's actions. The deal may not have any legal implications for linux users anywhere, but the patent agreement is going back on a promise they made earlier to the Linux community. On top of that, it's just not a friendly act towards the rest of the community. Other objections have been raised, such attempting to circumvent the PLL, but I can't see how that works, and neither can Mogen Eblen, so I think the whole thing's a combination marketing-and-barratry-deal.
There are some reservations still as to what else may have been agreed upon. A lot of people are concerned that Novell may try and inject code that clearly violate MS patents into one or more open source packages. Mono and the new OpenOffice fork are particularly worrying in that regard.
So to sum up:
Bad Guys:Microsoft, SCO.
Self-Serving Opportunists:Novell
Good Guys:Linux devs, distributors other than Novell and SCO, users
Caught In The Crossfire:SUSE devs
Hope that helps. Have a nice day.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Dude, have you actually heard what Steve Ballmer has to say? He cares less about making money and more about destroying the competition.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Read the Halloween Memos. They do, in fact, expend effort to crush what they see as their only real competition: http://www.catb.org/~esr/halloween/